by Laura Preble
Breath would be wasted on him. The gun. The gun is on the floor. If I move fast, I can get it before he gets up. I’m losing my grip on him…time to act. I jump off, scramble for the gun, and then turn it on him.
“That’s not how it ends,” he says as he lowers his head and shoulders and tackles me. I grab the gun in a death grip—I won’t let it go. “It ends with you dying, Sebastian. You and her.” Then we’re a tangle of limbs, and somewhere inside of me, a fire sparks, and I think of her. Gripping the barrel of the gun, I pummel his smug face—the first contact of metal on flesh terrifies me, numbs me, but I keep smashing it again and again and again until he stops moving.
My hands are red and slick. His coat is dotted with scarlet spatters. He lies still.
I pick up the gun, wipe my hands on the hem of his coat, and walk away. “Chris,” I murmur. “My name is Chris.”
The hallway is eerily empty—no guards, just the ear-splitting echo of the warning siren. I realize I don’t even know how to get back to the bunk room, or anywhere. We’ve always been led wherever we’ve gone. One way is as good as another, I guess. Around a corner, one lone guard stands against a pillar, tense, waiting for intruders. He turns his gun on me, and I point mine at him.
His arm falters for a second; I think he’s shocked to see an armed prisoner. Why not? We’ve been nothing but docile sheep. “We’re in quarantine,” he says.
“I’m not.” I point the gun at his head, but I can’t—don’t know how—to use it. It seems so easy in movies, but when it’s a real gun aimed at a real person…
The guard doesn’t have the same problem. He shoots me, but I dodge and the bullet lodges in my left shoulder instead of my head. Searing pain for a flash, then nothing, just numbness. I aim the gun with my right hand, pull the trigger, and the guard goes down. Before he can recover, I run. My shoulder doesn’t feel like part of me anymore, it’s just a dead weight I’m hauling.
I don’t want to look at my arm. There’s probably blood—blood used to make me squeamish. Suddenly I’m hot, burning up, like I entered a sauna, but nothing has changed. I keep shuffling forward, hoping to find someone who knows what I’m supposed to do.
The claxon stops abruptly—and now I can hear other noises, the sounds of people in the distance, down how many corridors, I don’t know. I lean against the metal wall to my right, and will myself to follow it, trying to stay upright. If I fall, that’s probably the end. I think of Carmen. I will see her again. Would he have killed her already? No. He couldn’t have, he didn’t have time. That means she’s alive somewhere. I have to find her. I follow the sound.
The sound of people running echoes off the walls behind me. I turn, ready to fight if I have to, although with my dead-weight arm, I don’t know how I’ll be able to do it. Even the good arm is shaking, and I’m dizzy.
Abraham and Noah come around the corner, with three other men. They have guns. “You made it!” Abraham smiles, then glances at my arm, blinks, and motions for Noah to do something to it. As Noah rips a piece of fabric from the hem of his jumpsuit and starts to wrap up the bloody arm, Abraham says, “The raid has started. We have to get outside. Remember the numbers in case we get separated.”
“What raid?” Now the arm hurts where Noah’s tugging on it. Waves of pain wash over it and I breathe deep to keep from falling over completely.
Abraham motions for Noah to hurry. “Our contact within the guard told me the raid was planned for today. It worked; the Resistance went public. The Canadians are involved. Someone is finally going against the Anglicants.”
“What about the women?” Sweat is starting to stream down my face. So hot in here. “We have to go get them.”
“No time,” one of the other men says, glancing behind him. “I think we’ve been spotted. We have to move. Now.”
“I can’t go,” I say, turning to Abraham. “I can’t go without her.”
“If you stay here, you’ll be dead. Just move.” He grabs me under the arm, and Noah takes the other, injured one, which sends white-hot pain searing through my upper body.
They walk-drag me down the corridor, with men behind, guns drawn. Finally we get to the kitchen area. Someone inserts a key card into the slot, and the door opens as if by magic. “Where are the guards?” I ask.
Nobody answers. We just move forward, always forward.
The kitchen is empty. The door, the numbered keypad, waits there unprotected, our way out. Abraham keys in the numbers, and we move as one through that door too. We all walk in perfect silence. This place has groomed us for that, at least.
We’re in an unfinished cement stairwell. “Alright. We may have five minutes,” Abraham says. “We’re going up to the roof, and from there, we jump down to ground, run like hell.”
“What about outside?”
“If we’re lucky, that’s been taken care of. “ Abraham moves forward with the men trailing him, then starts to ascend the stairs.
“I want to find the women,” I repeat again. But I know it will be impossible to do on my own; I’m feeling weaker every second, even though I think the bleeding has stopped temporarily.
Abraham frowns. “We can’t get to them. We don’t even know where they are.”
“We can’t just leave them.”
“We can. We have to.”
Noah stand next to me. “My wife is in there. I know where they are.” Murmurs from other men reveal that it’s the same for them too.
Abraham shakes his head. “We could barely coordinate this!” he says. “We don’t have time for argument. I’m going to the roof. Who’s coming?” Half the men follow him. The other half stay with me.
“What now?” Noah asks, blinking.
“I don’t know. I’m not a leader.”
“You are now.” Noah grabs my good arm and we run down a hallway that branches off left. “We have to go to the main intake room; the entrance the women’s prison is there.”
“We’ll be killed,” an older man whispers desperately.
Noah stares at him. “That’s not the worst thing that can happen.” He presses a knife into my hand. “Take this. Can you stab somebody?”
“I don’t know.”
“You will.” He runs ahead of me, through a maze of halls until he gets to a door, I guess the door to the intake area. He looks through a small glass, and gestures to me and the other men. “There’s one intake counselor. Probably middle of the night, or lunch. Sebastian, you take her. Kill her.”
“Kill her?”
“Yes. Make sure she’s dead. We don’t need company.” Noah glances down at my hand, which is shaking. “If you can’t do it, give it to me.” He doesn’t know I’ve already killed two people today. I won’t think about that. Can’t.
“No. I can.” If it means getting Carmen out, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.
“Once he’s taken her out, we break to the women’s quadrant, subdue the guards and throw the locks open. Hopefully they’re ready.”
“They’re doing this too?” I ask.
Noah shakes his head like I’m an idiot. “We’ve been coordinating this for months. You think you just walked in and we decided to stage a big breakout for your benefit?” The other men murmur; they’re restless. He stands aside. “Key in the numbers.”
I do it. He opens the door slightly, slowly, for me, and I slip out, low to the floor so I’m below the height of the counter. I crawl on my belly to the door leading to the reception area, dragging the injured shoulder.
I stand up, take a deep breath, kick in the door, and stab the woman in the chest as she turns to see who I am. I plunge the knife in deep, pull it up as far as I can into the flesh, and a river of blood pours out onto the floor — she looks surprised. Then she collapses.
Noah and the others rush in, and I follow, wiping my hands on the orange jumpsuit.
We flow like water through another door, down another corridor. “Do you all have women in there?” I manage to pant.
Most of the men grunt wit
h the little breath they have; we’re not strong. How we’re going to pull off a prison break I do not know. But I’d rather die trying than rot in Ashburn’s therapy room for the rest of my life.
Noah finally holds his hand up to stop us. “We’re here,” he says softly. “If we’re lucky, one of our guards is on the other side of this door. If we’re not lucky, it was nice knowing all of you.” He takes a deep breath. “And my real name is Justin.”
He opens the door a crack, and I see a black uniform on the other side. We get in. Five guards are there, women, women who are with us. An alarm sounds, sirens, then gunshots, rapid fire, a searing pain like a hot poker digging into my back, and I fall to the floor—sound fades away in a wave, like an ocean going out, leaving nothing. Smoke floods the corridor, and red emergency lights flash as lights go out.
“Chris!” I hear her. I hear her, faint, but it’s her voice. From the floor, I see feet, try to move, can’t make my legs work…Then she’s there, holding me, dragging me back through the door. We’re borne forward on a wave of orange, but I don’t hear anything at all. She’s talking to me, her mouth moves, but no sound.
The wave spills out into the reception room; I glance at the woman I killed. She still looks surprised. I feel sick.
The flood of prisoners is peppered with the black exclamation marks of uniformed soldiers who’ve turned to our side. Seven or so take the front, kick open the main doors, and sunshine washes into the room. I had thought it was night. Like a school of fish gasping out of water we swim toward that open door, hungry for air and light.
Hearing starts to come back—faint pops of single gunshots, rapid staccato of machine gun fire, the screams of those who are hit. I’d rather not hear any of it. Something is wrong with me. Carmen still drags me along as if my legs don’t work…they don’t seem to. Someone else is helping her carry me. A guard, a female, bleeding from a shoulder wound.
Outside, the world is ablaze. Flames lick at the wooden guard towers as black-clad sentries jump to avoid being burnt alive. Carmen and the female guard drag me away from the fire, toward a wooded area away from the fighting. “I’ve got to help,” I say, struggling to speak.
“We have to get you away from this,” Carmen yells over the noise. I can’t fight them; I have to admit I’m totally helpless. Images are swimming in front of my eyes, like objects seen through the heat of a fire.
They drag me back behind a stand of oak trees, out of sight. The female soldier studies my face. “Can you hear me?”
I nod. She grimaces, then turns me sideways. “Wrap something on that—looks like a puncture, lodged in there…should keep him from bleeding too much. Looks like he already has a shot to the shoulder. But we need to get him to a trauma center as soon as possible.” She glances at Carmen. “So this is him, huh?”
Carmen, who hasn’t let go of me, nods, smiling through the tracks of tears and smoke on her face.
“Well, God bless.” She cups my chin in her hand and kisses my cheek, hugs Carmen, and then runs back, gun raised, into the fighting.
Carmen takes my face in her hands, kisses me hard on the mouth with dry, cracked lips, then lays her head on my shoulder, sobbing soundlessly. “I didn’t think I would see you again,” she whispers in my ear.
“You told me to have faith,” I remind her.
“I know.” She cups my head in her hands and I fall into her blue eyes. “I love you.”
I wrap my arms around her as best I can, and try to pretend that none of this has ever happened. The gunshot doesn’t even hurt; it’s kind of just a numb, cold feeling that makes my head fuzzy. “I love you too.”
I don’t know how long the fighting goes on; we just stay in our bubble of happiness and at that moment, I wouldn’t have cared if we’d been blown to bits as long as we were together. But I feel Carmen move, look up as if she’s sensed something, and her eyes get wide like it’s Christmas or the end of the world.
“What is it?” I try to turn to see, but I can’t.
“The cavalry.” Tears stream down her face, pooling at the edges of a smile full of hope.
Sirens come from beyond the woods, and I hear the crunch of heavy tires on gravel. “Turn me around!”
“I shouldn’t move you—” she starts to say. I grab at her jumpsuit, her arms, try to pull myself toward whatever this great thing is. I manage to turn my head, and I’m shocked.
Six black armored trucks in a caravan, Canadian military transports, a tank (a tank!), all squealing into the compound. People in Kevlar pour out of the transports like ebony ants, and stream toward the fighting, assault rifles drawn. Everything stops. The soldiers from the camp stop, put their hands up, drop their weapons. Maybe they didn’t want to be doing what they were doing any more than I wanted to be there. Or maybe they know they’re outnumbered. It’s all over so quickly that it never even seems to begin.
“Look,” Carmen says softly. Following the Canadian military caravan, which is now focused on storming the complex, rounding up the compound guards and helping the wounded, there’s this huge out-of-place Cadillac Escalade.
It jerks to a stop and Warren and Jana jump out. Carmen yells and waves them over.
“Chris!” Warren yells as he trundles over the gravel toward me as fast as his legs will carry him. Jana beats him, and when she gets to me, there are tears in her eyes too.
“We came to bring you home,” she says, burying her blond hair in my shoulder.
“He’s been shot,” Carmen says in a tiny voice.
Warren kneels next to me, cups my face in his hand, strokes my shaved head. “I am so sorry.” His voice cracks. “I hope you can forgive me.”
“You didn’t do anything—” I say, my tongue feeling thick.
“You’re right. I didn’t do anything.” He wraps me in his arms, hugs me so hard I nearly lose my breath. “I should’ve done a lot of things…but that’s past. I’m here now.” He motions to Carmen. “Come here.” She timidly finds her place encircled in his other arm.
“I…I can’t walk,” I finally say.
“We’re here, you don’t need to walk. Jana? Go find a paramedic.” My sister nods and bolts out toward the emergency vehicles congregating on the lawn.
“You got the video?”
Warren nods sadly. “I did. When people saw it, things exploded. Apparently, it was all the Resistance needed to gain final support; the Canadians stormed the borders a few days after it went live.”
Suddenly everything feels kind of wrapped in cotton, soft, warm, fuzzy. I just want to close my eyes and sleep, that’s all.
“I think he’s going into shock,” I hear Warren say. The light dwindles down to a single narrow tunnel surrounded by silver stars, and at the end, Carmen’s face, worried, smiling, mouthing the words ‘I love you.’
Chapter 19
Eight months later
I’m on a back porch, on a white wooden swing. The garden overflows with blue lobelia, white impatiens, violets. As I drift, the scents of the flowers swirl around me. Warm air is filled with the humming of insects, an occasional bird, the rolling wash of the river rushing at the edge of the yard.
Carmen steps onto the porch with two glasses of tea. She hands me one, slick with condensation, and sits next to me. She moves the swing, slowly, slowly.
“How’re you feeling today?” she asks finally.
“Better.” I sip the tea.
“Therapy in half an hour.” She brakes the swing with one foot. “Jana said you’re making good progress. You won’t even need the wheelchair in a month, she says.”
“Hmm.” I blink, staring into the watered silk sunshine of the late Canadian afternoon.
“Chris,” she says, hesitating. I know what she’s going to say. “You need to talk about it.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You have to. Otherwise, it just stays in here, trapped.” She taps my skull, but I grab her wrist and pull it to my lips, kiss it delicately at the thinnest part of the ski
n where blue-violet veins trace tiny rivers.
“It can stay there, then.” She doesn’t understand. I don’t want to dissect what happened, or take those memories out of the box they’re in. I visit them in my nightmares often enough. What happened is always there between us, in the way we move so cautiously, in our haunted eyes, in the way we need open spaces and locks upon locks on our doors.
She sighs and allows the swing to move again, up, back, up back. “The vote is today. I suppose you remember that?”
I nod and sip my tea.
“Aren’t you excited?” Her eyes are shining, so I can’t help but smile. “Wish we could vote.”
“Too late to go back.” The truth is, I don’t want to have anything to do with American politics. When we moved here, I decided I’d start over, and that meant cutting ties to everything south, except Warren and Jana. Carmen doesn’t understand that. “And it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter? It’s amazing. It’s been less than a year since we’ve been gone, and look what’s happened!” She grabs my hand, her eyes shining. “This is because of what you did, because of what we did.”
I know she’s right, but it doesn’t feel like much of a cause for celebration. “So they finally realized that torturing people because of who they love is bad. But do you think that’s going to change how they think? You think a law will stop all of that? Maybe they won’t be actively rounding us up and herding us into secret camps, but is it really changing how people feel about things?”
When Warren got the footage on CNN, that was the end. Canadians rolled in to force the Church to stop, and the allies in the House supported the movement – there’s a whole revolution going on now. The government doesn’t want to appear to be advocating torture, even for such a ‘worthy’ cause.
“What they really had was an image problem, not an attack of conscience. And so many people dead. Abraham, Noah, Magnus. McFarland.”
“He deserved it,” she begins.
“Nobody deserves it.” I don’t want to talk about it, so I bury my commentary in more iced tea. Unbidden, the image of Ashburn’s bloody face floats in my mind’s eye. Did he deserve it? I wish I could say no, but that would be a lie. One of the biggest agonies of my life is that I killed him, and never felt remorse about it.
